The UNESCO CodeTheCurve Hackathon encouraging digital solutions to the global pandemic has announced its 40 finalists, including three Russian teams of which two come from Skoltech.

“In crises like the COVID-19 pandemic, individuals and entire organizations unveil their inner potential. I’m happy to see that Skoltech’s students and employees are doing their part,” Maxim Fedorov, director of the Skoltech Center for Computational and Data-Intensive Science and Engineering (CDISE), commented on Skoltech’s impressive achievement.

Skoltech entered the finals with two projects: Coronomy and CureIT’20.

The Coronomy project developed by a Skoltech team under the supervision of a CDISE assistant professor, Dmitry Dylov, helps combat unemployment, a painful after-effect of the pandemic. Oriented towards the unemployed and the owners of bankrupt companies, the project offers a socially responsible database where job-seekers and potential employers can download their profiles, “meet” each other and join efforts in fundraising. The project strategy is directed at revitalizing the broken economy after the pandemic.

Another assistant professor at CDISE, Petr Popov, leads a project team for CureIT’20, a project that leverages the frontier Machine Learning (ML) technologies in combatting the pandemic. The team’s young scientists with experience in molecular modeling evaluate drug candidates in terms of their effect on the previously unexplored part of the coronavirus envelope proteins using molecular screening and propose specific structures of chemicals that can suppress the virus in the human body.

Only one fifth of all the teams made it through a rigorous selection to the finals. Each addressed one of the three key topics: 1) ensuring continuity of learning; 2) managing data and information, and 3) dealing with present and future societal and healthcare challenges. The hackathon will last until April 30, 2020.